TRAFFIC RELATED REPRESENTATIVE AIRPORT CATEGORIES FOR TECHNOLOGY IMPACT EVALUATION

Abstract

Technology impact evaluations in air transport require the specification of environment conditions, such as the traffic structure. Since a multitude of worldwide traffic situations exists, this paper presents a systematic approach based on cluster analysis that can handle the worldwide diversity, while ensuring to determine most relevant traffic situations. This is crucial for the universality and global relevance of evaluation results. The approach is presented for the application example of runway capacity evaluation, as part of which features of daily movement distributions of airports and the traffic mix as well as peak situations are quantified. The resulting representative airport and peak categories comprise a limited set of typical traffic situations worldwide that can serve as standard input for capacity-related evaluation, ensuring comparability and clarity.